Date of Award
8-13-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
History
First Advisor
John Kirk
Abstract
In Arkansas’s long path toward modernizing its executive branch, it may appear to the casual observer that the state was locked in a process in which its politics and its culture were engaged in a longstanding tug-of-war between traditionalists and modernizers—a conflict complicated by the state’s personality-based politics and restrictive post-Reconstruction constitution. It has often been asserted that the conflict, in Arkansas’s case the romanticizing of rural life as opposed to the economic and social interests of the fast-growing suburbs of Central and Northwest Arkansas, explains a great deal of this slow transition. This attitude was largely a product of what political scientist Diane Blair described as a lack of “clearheaded political leaders [who] might have educated the common people to their just political demands and aroused their governmental expectations.” Arkansas’s governmental and political heritage has long defied the simple rural-versus-urban stereotypes that were often prevalent inside and outside the South.
Recommended Citation
Edmonds, Revis. L., "The Governor’s Cabinet Project a Study of the Evolution of the Executive Branch" (2025). Theses and Dissertations. 1288.
https://research.ualr.edu/etd/1288
